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    Descarta lived in a castle. This was absolutely zero surprise to literally any of us. As the city lord, she had plenty of access to the best resources, and I wasn’t sure why anyone would choose NOT to have a castle if given the choice.


    We were led to the entrance hall and left to wait, and I waited with bated breath, my armor and mask back in place. I’d tried to use Dantalion to scan the place, but the castle was made of C-ranked materials, and I couldn’t get a decent read. I ignored that, pacing back and forth as I considered my options, but I was stopped after a minute when a familiar hand caught mine, pulling me to a halt.


    “Shane,” Callie said softly. “This isn’t on you. We came to help them, and we still will. Getting snatched up by this C-ranker was just bad luck.”


    Bethy chimed in. “She’s right, you know. C-rankers do whatever to weaker Ascendants. No guarantee they would have been safe if they didn’t know you. Actually, maybe the opposite. Chances are good that they’re only alive now because they provide leverage. Knowing you probably saved them.”


    I just shook my head. “I get your point, but they wouldn’t BE here if I hadn’t painted a target on them to begin with.”


    “Yeah,” said Abel lazily. “They might just be dead. We have no idea how your interaction helped or changed them, or how far reaching the effects are. Welcome to being alive. We’re all just exploding balls of chaos bouncing off each other and careening into walls of random chance. Any person you’ve ever met might have been better off without you, or they might be a corpse now. No way to tell, and worrying about it is an exercise in pointless self pity.”


    I snorted in amusement. “Tell me how you really feel Abel, no need to sugar coat it.”


    “That WAS sugar coating it,” he said dryly. “I didn’t make loud sniffling baby noises at you or point and laugh. That was about the nicest way I could have said that.”


    My sister giggled at that, and I turned to glare at her, but she just stuck her tongue out. I smiled a bit, about to get into some relaxing bickering with my twin, but sadly my catharsis was cut off by Caladwen’s return. The Citizen was gone, apparently having headed back once he finished his task, and she was our only real contact here. I made a note to pay her back for her help how I could.


    “Alright,” she said as she entered the room. “You’ve got ten minutes. I’m not sure exactly what you’ve got to offer, but if you’re asking for what I think you are, I hope it’s a lot. Dez isn’t afraid of Algenclave, but challenging any of the generals is a stupid idea if you aren’t SURE you’ll win easily. It’s usually best to team up with someone else who hates them, and she doesn’t have any backup she would trust with an operation like that.”


    I nodded, unsurprised that it would be a hard sell, but I was pretty confident in my wares. Wish scrolls were extremely versatile, and would be indescribably tempting to anyone stuck at the peak of what a world could withstand. Within the same rank, skills and techniques were key to raising combat potential. Just like Abel, Bethy, Callie, and I could fight across our rank because of our powerful techniques and Skills, Dezcarta could theoretically go from a middling C-ranker to being nearly unbeatable at the same rank with a few wishes.


    Most of the time, Ascendant power structures came down to two things, advancement or entrenchment. The two schools of thought were either to move forward as quickly as possible, relying on higher Impact and rapid core improvement to compete, or to firm up your foundations at the same level, making yourself unbeatable.


    Ninety percent of Ascendants who HAD this choice (much like myself) chose the former, because no matter how powerful you got, at higher ranks, tier barriers were nearly impassable.


    But in places with a power ceiling, entrenchment became a much more viable strategy. Since no one was behind a tier barrier, developing yourself to the extreme wasn’t just NOT a pointless timesink, it was an integral part of the development process. Wishes were exponentially more effective to people in this situation, because rather than use them to advance like we did, they could use them to improve and integrate new techniques and Skills.


    I was still thinking about the dichotomy when Caladwen led us into the throne room, where a red haired woman with an eye patch lounged on a giant iron chair that could NOT have been comfortable. She didn’t even glance up from the book she was reading as we entered.


    “Heard you helped me get rid of that shitbag priest,” she drawled lazily. “As a reward, I’ll hear you out. You’ve got five minutes, go.”


    “I’m Shane Wyndham, I’m a member of the Wyndham family of the Wish Curse Palace, and I can grant wishes. If you help us, I’ll grant some of yours.” I didn’t hedge, didn’t hold back. She might turn on us, but I had ways to escape if she did. She might be a C-ranker, but I had items and abilities that could let my friends get us clear. If I chose to use them.


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    She went still, her eye raising slowly to look at me, a predatory gleam in the single amber iris. “Well,” she purred. “Isn’t THAT interesting.” In a blink, she was standing WAY too close, her face decidedly in my personal space as she stared into my mask. “Wishes, is it? How novel.”


    “I want your help rescuing my friends,” I told her bluntly. “In exchange, I’ll help YOU deal with the D-rankers Algenclave is working with. I suspect they’re here for me anyway. I’ll even supply you with the wishes ahead of time so you can use them in the fight. One of my wishes can be EXTREMELY devastating in combat. Bindings, suppression, direct attacks. So many possibilities.”


    Dezcarta looked…well, hungry was the best word I could come up with. Like she was a cat and I’d just let a mouse loose in front of her. I wasn’t sure about the relationship between the generals, but I suspected that it wasn’t positive. She’d been extremely keen to remove that priest, not because of his damage to the city, but because he was related to Algenclave. She must really want him dead, and I was giving her a surefire way to do that.


    “You want my help to save your friends,” she reiterated slowly. “It’s possible, but how many of these ‘wishes’ will I get? If it’s just the ones I need to destroy Algenclave, I won’t gain much from them, will I?”


    I chuckled. “Wishes need to be paid for with fair compensation. It’s a requirement of my power and can’t be changed. I can give ten, but you should know that you can only use the promise of aid to pay for a few of them at most. The rest you’ll need to pay for out of pocket, and I can’t do anything about that.”


    Sometimes I wondered if my ancestor had worked in such rigorous compensation rules just to justify not having to help every random person who arrived looking for a wish. The cost requirements certainly served a balancing purpose that enabled him to reach the heights of perfection required for that three times bonus, but they also made interactions regarding wishes much easier to deal with. No questions about freebies, it’s impossible, pay up or get lost.


    Knowing what I did about techniques, mythology, and domains, I wondered if this reflected a core mindset trait of the Wishmaster. Or maybe it had CAUSED that mindset trait, you never knew with Ascendants. Whatever the case, he clearly didn’t mind the trait, since he didn’t bother to erase it when authoring his Chronicle.


    Once I explained how things worked, I took out ten scrolls. These were two thirds of my total non emergency scroll stash, but I wasn’t going to be stingy with them. Aside from wanting to help my friends, like I’d told her already, it wasn’t like she could get anything for free from them.


    Picking one up, she examined it, then unfolded it and read over the scroll itself. The physical vessel of the scrolls wasn’t super important, but it was still anchored in a specific way. Scrolls were the form I could use, and if it was possible to use anything else I wasn’t aware of how. I didn’t care much though, scroll, book, monogrammed cookie, it didn’t matter what form it took as long as it worked.


    She frowned at it as she read…something, I wasn’t seeing what she did, though I probably could have if I tried.


    “So you’re saying I can use the agreement to help your friends as payment for one of these?” her voice was cautious, but optimistic. “Or was it more than one? How would that work? Would I have to make all the wishes up front?”


    I shrugged. “Possibly, but it would be easier to break the task into multiple steps and pay for each one with a wish. In this case. Escort us to Shadowcrack and help us enter safely, delay or defeat Algenclave, then help us retreat safely with my friends in tow, to the best of your ability. Those terms sound reasonable?”


    While I couldn’t tell her what to wish for because it would have violated the spirit of ‘fair compensation’ I could tell her what kind of payment I wanted. That was just common sense. Otherwise my power would be useless.


    She nodded slowly. “I can probably work with that. I have some followup questions though. What do you consider safely, when does my role in your entrance end and when does my role in your escape begin? What level of responsibility do I have for your experience inside as I delay Algenclave, at least as it regards to fallout or to his helpers?”


    “Once we enter the building that houses the dungeons they’re locked up in, your infiltration help will be concluded,” I said after a moment. “Once we successfully leave the building your exfiltration duties will begin. We just need to get AWAY, it doesn’t need to be perfect. As long as we can lost them initially, I have ways of disappearing.”


    Not to mention once we had my friends I could have Callie contact my grandmother to get us out. She’d been able to create an entrance for us when we arrived, and she was more than capable of extracting us, even through the spatial issues. She just needed an anchor point inside the Dungeon where she knew we could be found to make that connection. It was part of why Callie had the Starpluck Bangle on standby.


    Dezcarta looked intrigued, and finally, after a bit more negotiation, she grinned and hopped down from her chair, ambling over to shake my hand. “Fantastic. Now I just need to figure out what to use these wishes for before we go, so, do you have any suggestions for me?”


    Of course, I didn’t. I couldn’t tell her what to wish for, because if I was involved my bias toward the wish would make any payment similar to being paid twice. Luckily, I had other options. I grinned at her, even if she couldn’t see it behind my mask. “Not personally, no. But lucky for you, I brought an expert at working with me on getting the most out of wishes. Allow me to introduce you to my wife.” I put an arm around Callie, dragging her forward, and Dezcarta eyed her like a hungry wolf. I was too distracted by the upcoming mission to pay too much attention to Callie’s groan of irritation. It was almost time to save my friends.